The Penobscot Boom above Old Town, Maine, was once the most valuable single piece of property on the entire river, a floating fence of chained logs and rock-filled wooden cribs that caught, sorted, and counted the entire timber output of the northern watershed. For nearly a century, every log that came down the Penobscot River had to pass through it, and every owner had to pay to get his own timber back out. The structure was built of nothing but wood, iron, stone, and the river itself. It had no engine anywhere in it.
Yet it decided which logs reached the sawmills and which ones vanished downstream for good, and it did this with a precision that made Bangor the greatest lumber shipping port in the world for a stretch of the 1800s. The problem the boom solved is one almost nobody thinks about when picturing old-time logging. Everyone pictures the axe and the falling pine. Almost nobody pictures what happens after.
Every winter, dozens of separate companies cut timber through the North Maine woods, and every spring, all of it went into the same river at the same time in the same flood. Hundreds of thousands of logs from dozens of different owners mixed together in one roaring mass of water and wood, and every single log belonged to somebody. Somebody had to pull that mixed flood apart, log by log, and give every stick back to the man who had paid to cut it. And they had to do it fast, because logs would waterlog and sink if they sat too long, and the summer would drop the river too low to move anything at all.
A fortune in timber arrived all at once, tangled and anonymous, and there was only a short window to turn that chaos back into orderly, owned, countable property. In the 1820s, crews strung the first great boom across the river north of Old Town, and in 1832, the state of Maine chartered the Penobscot Boom Corporation, led by Bangor lumber baron Rufus Dwinell, to build it out and run it. The charter gave the company the right to throw a barrier clear across the Stillwater branch of the Penobscot and to plant piers and side booms wherever the work required them. The company that held the boom sat astride the one gate every log had to pass, which made it one of the most valuable pieces of property on the whole river.
Dwinell did not hold it long. In 1833, he sold the works to General Samuel Veazie, one of the biggest lumbermen in the state. Veazie decided the boom’s first home at Pea Cove could not handle the volume that was coming, so in the winter of 1836 and 1837, he moved the whole operation downriver and built a far larger boom at Argyle, between an island called White and the western bank. Argyle became the heart of the operation.
For roughly the next 90 years, it was the chief sorting, rafting, and scaling boom on the river, the place where the entire cut of the Penobscot watershed was caught, read, and handed back to its owners. The sawmills were clustered on the falls just below, at Old Town, Orono, Stillwater, and Great Works, making the water just above the mills the one place where the whole river’s timber was guaranteed to pass in a single channel. The only thing that told one company’s timber from another’s was a private mark, a small pattern of axe cuts hammered into the end of every log up in the winter woods, the way a rancher brands cattle. On the Penobscot, more than 200 of these marks were registered, each one belonging to a single owner, each one a different combination of cuts and notches that could still be read after a log had ground its way a hundred miles downriver.
The men who worked the boom called them dog tracks. These were not casual scratches. A log mark was registered property, protected at law, and altering one was treated as a kind of forgery, because forging a mark was a way to steal a standing tree. A log with a clear mark was money in the bank.
A log whose mark had been battered off in the drive was a log that nobody could legally claim, and it went to a separate account for strays. The boom was anchored to the riverbed by more than 100 artificial islands, and the men built every one of them in the dead of winter, standing on the frozen river. There were 126 of these piers along the Argyle works. Each one was a crib, a great open box framed out of heavy timber, built out on the ice in January and February when the river was frozen thick enough to carry the weight of the work.
The crews framed the crib on top of the ice, then filled it with rock, hauling stone across the frozen river on sleds and stacking it inside the timber box until the load grew enormous. Then they cut the ice out from underneath the whole thing, and the crib and its cargo of stone dropped straight down and settled onto the river bottom. If the pier came up short of the surface, they framed another crib on top of the first, filled it with more stone, and let it sink again. The upstream face of each pier was built on a slant to meet the current and turn aside the spring ice.
Alongside the cribs, they drove long spruce pilings deep into the riverbed with a drop hammer worked from the water. All of these piers were built by hand out on the ice, and a great many were damaged and rebuilt every single spring, because the river never once stopped trying to take them apart. The stone did not come from the riverbed. It was quarried on shore, dragged out onto the ice on sleds, hauled by oxen and horses, then lifted into the timber crib by hand with block and tackle, one heavy load at a time, in the coldest weeks of a Maine winter.
They did it more than a hundred times to lay out the Argyle works, then went back and did it again wherever the ice had wrecked a pier. With the piers standing, the crew strung the boom itself, taking the longest, soundest logs and chaining them together end to end into a continuous floating line that ran from pier to pier across the water. In the end of each log, they bored a hole a couple of inches across and most of a foot deep, and through it they ran a thick iron pin with a head, locking the log to a short heavy chain and the chain to the next log. A single boom string could run more than a thousand feet, and it took miles of that chained boom to build out the full works.
In one season, the boom crew rigged the works with 80 tons of rope, all strung by hand, just to hold a river in place. The booms did different jobs. Sheer booms were set at an angle across the current so that the running logs, instead of piling straight into them, were shunted sideways, the way a plow throws snow off to the side of a road. A sheer boom could take the whole force of the flood and turn it, bleeding the logs out of the fast water and into quiet holding grounds behind the piers.
Trip booms and sorting booms were shorter sections that could be opened and closed to let a run of logs through a gap and then seal it again. Set together across a 10-mile stretch of river, they formed a single apparatus that could take an entire forest coming down in flood and bring it to a controlled stop. When the flood brought the winter’s cut down to Argyle, the whole mixed mass was steered by the sheer booms into the holding grounds, where acres of floating logs packed together, each carrying a different owner’s mark. Then men walked out onto it.
They were called checkers. A checker went out onto the floating logs themselves, out over open water, and moved from log to log reading the mark cut into the end of each one. Some worked holding onto a line stretched across the water for balance. Some worked from small rafts anchored in the current.
Either way, the job was the same: look at the dog track, know instantly which of more than 200 owners it belonged to, and shunt that log toward the right gap so it drifted into that owner’s pocket and no one else’s. Log after log, 10 and 12 hours a day, through the entire run of the drive. A man who could read every mark on the river at a glance was worth nearly as much as anyone on the works, and the company kept every one of those marks recorded in a registered book. All along the holding grounds, the booms were arranged so that each owner had a pocket, a section of penned water that belonged to their timber alone.
Between the open water and the pockets were sorting gaps, narrow openings that a single log could be steered through. The checker also had to shove each log with a pike pole at exactly the right instant, sending it gliding through the correct gap and into the correct pocket, while the current kept pushing a hundred more logs down onto him. A single slip put him straight into the water underneath the moving logs. A surprising number of the hands doing this were children.
In the early 1900s, of the 200 to 250 people working the Argyle Boom, perhaps a third were boys between the ages of 10 and 14. They were out there because they were light on their feet, quick, and completely at home on the moving logs, and because they were cheap to hire. A 12-year-old out on the open river in the spring, stepping from one rolling log to the next above cold deep water, was sorting a lumber baron’s fortune by the little marks on the ends and treating it as an ordinary summer job. Sorting was only half the job.
Once a checker had shunted a batch of one owner’s timber into his pocket, that timber had to be bound up and made ready for the last few miles down to the mills. The boom men gathered the sorted logs into small rafts they called joints, held together with light rope locked by wooden wedges, so the whole raft could be built and taken apart quickly by hand. Then the joints were coupled into long strings called swings, and the swings were strung together with heavy hawser into tows big enough to send down the river behind a steamboat. Twice a day, steamers came up to the boom, and men the crews called runners made up the new swings according to who had bought what.
The boom was not only a sorting yard, it was the counting house of the entire river. Every log that passed through was measured by a scaler, a man whose whole trade was estimating how many board feet of finished lumber a round log would yield. He read the length of the log and the diameter of its small end, ran it against a scaling rule, and called out a number, and that number was the log. A good scaler could size a stick in seconds and be trusted by buyer and seller alike to be fair.
Every operator on the Penobscot paid the driving company a fee for every board foot of his timber that came through the boom that season, so the scalers’ called numbers were, quite literally, the bills. The boom sat idle and frozen all winter while crews rebuilt what the ice had broken. At ice out in the spring, the works opened, and from that moment the boom ran without a real pause until the final log of the year had been sorted out of the river, which might not happen until the fall. None of this was safe, and none of it was still.
The boom was busiest at the exact moment the river was highest and coldest, in the spring flood, when the whole winter’s cut arrived at once. At the peak of the drive, the Argyle works put hundreds of men on the water at the same time. On one August drive in the 1880s, the boom employed 425 men, on top of all the boys. Every one of them spent the day on wet, rolling, shifting logs over water cold enough and deep enough to kill.
The men worked with pike poles and heavy hooked bars, prying and steering, and the logs answered slowly and then all at once. The greatest enemy of the boom was not any single flood, it was the ice, and it came back every year. When the river froze and then broke up in the spring, the ice ran downstream with enough force to shear off the pilings and stave in the cribs. Every winter the ice damaged the structure, and every spring, before the first logs came down, the crews were back out on the river repairing the piers, rebuilding what the ice had taken, and re-stringing the booms.
The boom a visitor saw floating there in June had been partly rebuilt by hand that very spring. In truth, it was never a permanent structure at all. The men recreated it every year out of the same rock and timber and iron against the same river that spent every winter tearing it down. In the biggest years of the Bangor trade, more than 200 million board feet of pine and spruce came down the river in a single season and squeezed through these booms, every stick caught, held, read, sorted, scaled, rafted, and sent on by hand.
A board foot is a plank a foot square and an inch thick. Line up 200 million of them end to end, and they would reach around the entire Earth and then a good way around it a second time. Enough finished lumber came through this one bend of the Penobscot in a single strong season to build a small city of houses, and it came through in the few months between ice out and freeze up. The money worked in a way that shows exactly how precise the sort had to be.
Because a log with a battered unreadable mark could not be given back to its owner, those strays were pulled aside and handled on their own separate account, and no company wanted its timber ending up in that pile. A log sent to the wrong pocket meant one company had paid to cut timber that a different company carried off to its mill. A log left unread was money that simply fell out of the system. The entire trade trusted a line of men and boys balancing on the logs to keep those mistakes down to almost nothing across every registered mark and that whole flood of timber, and by every account that comes down to us, they did exactly that.
At the end of the season, the books were squared. Each operator was billed for the board feet the scalers had credited to his mark. The strays were sold off on their own account, and the whole tangled flood of the spring resolved, on paper, into clean columns of owned and paid-for timber. Then the river froze, the boom came down, and the crews got ready to build the entire thing again.
The long log trade that built the boom eventually gave out, and the drives that fed it wound down through the 20th century, until the last log drive in the entire state of Maine came down the West Branch of the Penobscot in 1971. After that, the booms had nothing left to catch. The chain timbers were pulled, the rope rotted or was carried off, and the great sorting grounds at Argyle went quiet for good. Today, if you know exactly where to look on that stretch of the Penobscot above Old Town, you can still find the old boom piers, or what the ice and the years have left of them, low humps of stone and rotted timber standing out in the river where the whole trade once passed.
Most people who see them have no idea what they are looking at. A few of the old boom houses from the wider Penobscot system still stand upriver, kept now as small museums. But the great sorting works themselves, the 10 miles of piers and booms and pockets that did the actual job, are mostly just those stumps of stone in the water now. The log drive itself, the men riding the timber down through the rapids, gets remembered and painted and set to music.
The machine that caught everything they drove gets almost nothing, perhaps because the boom did its work without any drama. There was never one wild day at the boom to build a legend around. There were just the same 126 piers standing in the same river doing the same exacting work every spring for 90 years. And take that quiet machine out of the river, and all the daring on the drive upstream adds up to nothing, because there is no way left to turn a mixed flood of logs back into owned, sorted, sellable timber.
We tend to think of sorting, counting, and tracking a flood of goods as a modern problem, solved with scanners and machinery and warehouses full of computers. The men on the Penobscot solved it in the 1830s with axe marks, rock cribs, iron pins, rope, and their own eyes out on the surface of a river in flood, well enough to run the richest lumber trade on earth for the better part of a hundred years. The piers are still out there in the Penobscot above Old Town, holding their line in the current.